Sarah Cortez Ms.

Sarah Cortez's collections of poems include "How to Undress a Cop," winner of the PEN Texas Literary Award, "Cold Blue Steel," Goodbye, Mexico: Poems of Remembrance," winner of the International Latino Book Award, "Against Sky's Warm Belly" and "Vanishing Points: Poems and Photographs of Texas Roadside Memorials." She is the author of "Walking Home: Growing Up Hispanic in Houston" and editor of "Our Lost Border: Essays on Life amid the Narco-Violence."

Along Texas roadways rest thousands of contemplative shrines, usually marked by small, white metal crosses. Anchored by the stunning photography of roadside memorials by Dan Streck, this landmark book allows four poets to respond to the visual summons of roadside memorials with lyric intensity and eloquent ekphrasis: Larry D. Thomas, Jack B. Bedell, Sarah Cortez, and Loueva Smith. Graphic designer Nancy J. Parsons brings her award-winning skills to perfectly meld photography with poetry in this gorgeous volume. A Plain, White Cross It lists slightly beside the highway. Whoever placed it there drove its upright deep into the earth, intimate with the tragedy of wind and driving rain. Knowing the certainty of erasure, they left it nameless, just a simple wooden cross harboring, for a while, the traces of unbearable loss. As if lit from within with white light, it glows beside the silent highway: white light stark as the grief of the bereaved, white as the clouds above, streaking, disintegrating. Larry D. ThomasMore/less

The poems of Sarah Cortez flex lean muscles to build lyric intensity and a gripping edginess often backlit by an incandescent, controlled eroticism. Cortez reveals the hidden underworld of her fellow police officers, whose lives comprise the thin blue line and whose blood sometimes splashes and blackens on summer concrete. Aquarium And what of the water? A transparency we swim through, lithe white muscle, the glide of fins. We move and move forever inside reflections, refractions, ruckus from the other side. Our eyes never close. We see you coming. We don't think we're dinner.More/less